Update 16: March 27, 2004

1. Thumbnails illegal in
Germany?

The German-language
Google News went online in July 2003, covering about 700 news sources.
Germany was the 7th country to get a country-specific Google News service, which
presents information culled from many news sources. Topics are updated
continuously throughout the day. There are no human editors. Google has
developed an automated grouping process for Google News that pulls together
related headlines and photos. And here is the legal problem: Often thumbnail
images from other news sources are used to illustrate links. These thumbnails
could be in contradiction to copyright law. In the USA, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Kelly
v. Arriba Soft Corp. held that the " fair use" exception
includes "thumbnail" reproductions of copyrighted images generated by
a visual Internet search engine. But the legal situation is different in
Germany. Under the German Copyright Law of 1965there is no general
limitation of fair use, but a closed set of `limitations' on a copyright
owners rights (e.g. the reproduction for private or scientific use is permitted).
All limitations don't apply to the conversion of internet photos to "thumbnails",
according to the regional court of
Hamburg. This means that Google can no longer
use thumbnail images without the permission of the copyright owner. The decision
is on appeal.

2. Search Engines in the
News:

a. March 2004 (Articles in
English)

March
27, 2004: Peterson, Kim, MSN
to add features Google got to first, The Seattle Times:
"Microsoft's MSN division, still playing technological catch-up to
Internet search king Google, said yesterday that it would soon introduce
tools for people to search news articles online."

March
26, 2004: Hansen, Evan / Hu, Jim: Stoked
on search deals, News.com:
"Yahoo's $575 million acquisition of European e-commerce provider
Kelkoo is the Web portal's fourth major acquisition in the past year and a
half--the latest effort to expand its search business."

March
24, 2004: Google
promotes local search, websearch.about.com:
"Google shared their local search tool with the world this week by
unveiling the feature designed to compete with Yahoo!'s new local search
tools."

March
24, 2004: Kotadia, Munir, Google
talks without the browser, ZDNet:
"Google is not the obvious company to telephone when you are looking
for directions to a restaurant or hotel, but the popular search engine's
development team is hoping that its emerging voice search facility may over
time completely change the concept of a search engine."

March
22, 2004: Best, Jo, Man
arrested for allegedly extorting Google, News.com:
"A California man has been charged with extortion, after allegedly
making demands for $100,000 from search giant Google. According to court
papers, he claimed that if Google did not pay, he would release a piece of
software to spammers that would generate fake advertising hits, costing the
search giant millions."

March 11, 2004: Yahoo
cuts ties to Google in Asia-Pacific, ZDNet:
"Yahoo has dumped Google's algorithmic search technology for its
Australian and New Zealand portals in favor of an in-house search engine,
Yahoo Search Technologies."

March 6, 2004: Yahoo!
Adopts New Fees to Explore Web, KOTV
"
Internet giant Yahoo! Inc. is adopting a new system for indexing Web pages that
will charge businesses to include more material currently unlisted in its online
search engine, marking the first volley in a duel with its former ally Google
Inc."

Galitsky, Boris / Levene Mark, On
the economy of Web links: Simulating the exchange process, firstmonday.dk:
"In the modern Web economy, hyperlinks have already attained monetary value
as incoming links to a Web site can increase its visibility on major search
engines. Thus links can be viewed as investment instruments that can be the
subject of an exchange process. In this study we build a simple model performed
by rational agents, whereby links can be bought and sold. Through simulation we
achieve consistent economic behaviour of the artificial Web community and
provide analysis of its micro– and macro–level parameters. In our
simulations we take the link economy to its extreme, where a significant number
of links are exchanged, concluding that it will lead to a winner take all
situation."